H.O.
By Gene Aronowitz
One day, when we lived in Brooklyn, we went to see a movie at the Film Forum, a nonprofit art-house cinema in Greenwich Village, the go-to theater for the NYC cinephile community. On our way, we stopped at a health food store and bought some valerian root, an anxiety-reducing herb we fancied.
When we sat down in the theater, we noticed a fetid smell. Sitting in front of us was a rather unkempt person. Linda leaned over toward me and whispered, “H.O.”
“What?” I asked.
“Heinie odor,” she answered, an acronym she acquired as a teenager from one of her friends to refer to the repeated flatulence of someone they knew. We nodded to each other knowingly. I tilted my head, indicating that we should move, and we shifted our seats about three rows closer to the screen.
But the new location had the same stinky scent. Linda said, “It wasn’t that guy. It’s the theater that stinks.”
Back inside our house later that afternoon, Linda placed her backpack on the stairway. Bending down to take off her shoes, she noticed the same odor and removed the brown paper bag containing the valerian root. “It’s this,” she yelled. “This is what stinks.”
We laughed and wondered how many people might have sat behind us, wrinkling their noses and silently transferring to seats with presumably sweeter-smelling neighbors.
A version of this memoir is included in the book 23 More Memoirs.